


Alderaan Day

by straight_up_gay



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, The Skywalker Twins have very different ideas about redemption and forgiveness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 16:43:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9830192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/straight_up_gay/pseuds/straight_up_gay
Summary: Whatever title she goes by, Leia Organa is not a forgiving person.





	

Every year, no matter where in the galaxy they were, the Organa-Solo family observed Alderaan Day.

Leia would spend hours pinning her hair back in the traditional Alderaanian mourning style, heavy braids that had irritated her when she'd been younger. She couldn't figure out how you made L’lahsh, but she'd begged the recipe for Starberry Derr from an old Alderaanian expat. It wasn't the kind of food you made for funerals, but she figured it would be all right. Alderaanian mourning emphasized what the living owed the dead, but it didn't specify how they had to pay it.

Han was quieter on those days, his tongue not as sharp and his jokes not as flashy. He hadn't felt the planet crumble; he was less Force-sensitive than a spoon. Still, he understood the weight of the dead. And he'd sit by her side, even when she was so choked up with anger that the air around her vibrated.

Ben had been too young to understand it, at first. Every year, he'd asked about the holos projected around the room, the man with the laughing eyes and the woman with the stern mouth. 

And every year, Leia had leaned down to his level, and said solemnly, “Those are my parents. Your grandparents!”

Whatever her place in the Skywalker legacy, they deserved that much.

***

Before Senator Organa was a wife and a mother and a general, she was this: the most terrifying Speaker for the Persecution in the war crimes tribunal against the old Empire.

Dressed in the traditional Speaker's black, she was the bane of the Oppositionaries. She had a glare like blaster fire and an exacting knowledge of Old Republican laws. She had once filibustered a pardon for a high-ranking Imperial captain for so long that one of her opponents had died in his seat.

And, all the Tribunal Historians agree, she did her finest work during the Trial of Anakin Skywalker.

(When Luke had asked not to be a witness for the persecution, she’d nearly hit him. _How dare he_ , she'd asked, exhausted from two days of viewing holos about the lethal labour practices used in building the second Death Star. Luke hadn't said anything, just waited with his awful patience.

She would never understand it. Surely there had to be a bone-sharp edge beyond which forgiveness wouldn't go. To do otherwise was a disservice to the dead.)

Anakin Skywalker had been convicted of eighteen of the twenty-one war crimes he was accused of. With the terror the Empire had inspired, even after their overthrow, it was a brilliant victory.

***

General Organa-Solo still takes her day off to mourn Alderaan. Poe Dameron has been helping her make Starberry Derr for years, and now Finn sits vigil with her, silent. She'd thought about teaching Rey how to do the old braids, the ones that meant _wife_ and _strength_ and _mourning-for-the dead_ , but she'd thought better of it.

But there's another day she feels too, the day the First Order burned the Hosnian System to ash.

The Republic's scientists, scrambling in the wake of the tragedy, estimate that two billion life-forms had died that day. Leia knows they're wrong. It was two billion, eleven thousand and seventeen.

She'd felt every last minute, every gasp of terror, every parent holding their child or their brood or their hatchlings against the oncoming dark, Alderaan Day come early this year.

(The worst part, she thinks, is that Kylo Ren must have felt it too).

Sometimes she has dreams, still, of her unfamiliar son coming home across the galaxy to her door. Sometimes he has her mouth, sometimes Han’s trickster eyes.

And maybe it could still happen. After all, that’s the Skywalker legacy, isn't it? Coming back home repentant, with blood on your mouth.

But she is an Alderaanian before she is a Skywalker. When she has those dreams now, she wakes up with her jaw clenched, thinking about billions of voices crying out and then being silenced.

She owes the dead that much.

**Author's Note:**

>  **Someone on the internet** : how do you think Leia Organa, survivor of a planetary murder perpetrated by her own father, feels about Kylo Ren after the destruction of the Hosnian Prime system?
> 
>  **Me, a horrible person** : well,


End file.
